This is my year of horrible reading. I am reading the classics of horror fiction during thecourse of 2016, and each week will write abouta significant work in the genre. You are invitedto join me in my annus horribilis. During the course of the year—if we survive—we willhave tackled zombies, serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and monsters of all denominations. Check back each week for anew title...but remember to bring along garlic, silver bullets and a protective amulet. T.G.

How Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca Got R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Considered a lowbrow romance when it was first published, Rebecca has belatedly gained recognition as a Gothic suspense masterpiece

by Ted Gioia

"Rebecca is a lowbrow story with a middlebrow finish,” announced The TimesLiterary Supplement when Daphne du Maurier’s bestselling novel was firstissued in 1938. Critic V.S. Pritchett was even moredismissive in his review, announcing that Rebecca"would be here today, gone tomorrow." The noveldid generate positive coverage in Good Housekeepingand Ladies Home Journal, but that kind of praisedid more harm than good in elite literary circles.

Du Maurier, for her part, chafed at the notion thatshe wrote formulaic romances for the mass market.Her publisher hardly helped her cause (althoughperhaps elevated her sales) by the supermarket-racklook of their cheap paperback editions of her books.I can hardly blame critic Sam Jordison for admittingthat "before I read Rebecca I always thought of DuMaurier as a slightly more sophisticated BarbaraCartland."

Readers take note: Rebecca has had a makeover—not the text itself, which hasn't changed, but ratherits positioning in the literary universe. This novel hasslowly climbed the path from lowbrow to highbrow inthe eight decades since its initial publication, and is now more likely encounteredon a college syllabus than at a supermarket checkout counter. You will now findRebecca on the assigned reading lists of classes on gender politics, British fiction, Gothic style and other academic subjects. In short, Rebecca has gotten classy.

It perhaps helps that the cover of my current-day edition dispenses withromance, and instead features a sober, sepia-toned photo of an autumn landscape.But the credit really goes to du Maurier, who never wrote down to her readers,and at her best was a prose stylist of the highest rank. As a result, what was onceconsidered by many an escapist romance is now lauded as a classic of modernGothic, and a textbook example of how to intensify narrative suspense throughindirection and ambiance.

Indeed, the title heroine never appears in thesepages. The story begins after the death of Rebeccade Winter, when her distraught husband Maximis trying to forget the circumstances surroundingher demise. But Rebecca haunts almost every pageof this novel. Over the course of 400 pages, readerswill follow the course of Maxim's second courtshipand marriage, to the unnamed woman who narratesour tale, but a story-behind-the-story also graduallyemerges, and eventually dominates the book, aboutthe first Mrs. de Winter and her almost hypnotic hold on everyone she knew.

Rebecca ranks among the most acute literary explorations of jealousy, and Isuspect that much of its verisimilitude comes from the firsthand experiences of itsauthor. Six years before the publication of Rebecca, the author married Britishmilitary hero Frederick 'Boy' Browning, who had previously been engaged toJeannette Ricardo, a glamorous, vivacious young woman who bears more than alittle resemblance to the fictional Rebecca. The wedding was postponed, andeventually the engagement was broken, but in the early days of du Maurier'ssubsequent marriage, she discovered old letters from Ricardo—who signed hername with a flamboyant capital R much like Rebecca—and began to fear that herhusband might still hanker after his old flame. In an eerie twist to the story, JanRicardo committed suicide in 1944 at age 39, the real-life Rebecca dying youngmuch like the fictional one.

Other details in Rebecca are drawn from du Maurier’s married life, in particularthe estate Manderley, ancestral home of the de Winter family. This setting, almostas important as plot and character in the success of Rebecca, is based onMenabilly in Cornwall, where du Maurier lived from 1943 to 1969. She also addeddetails from the more lavish Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire, a stately residence shehad visited several times during her childhood. Some of my favorite passages inRebecca describe the domestic setting of the story—at the top of the list I place alovingly detailed account ofManderley's gardens and grounds, some thirty pagesinto the novel, that I would consider assigning to aspiring writers who want tounderstand how to handlelandscape in a narrative.

Given the intensely personal nature of this book, I am surprised that charges ofplagiarism are still raised against Rebecca. Edwina Levin MacDonald startedthese allegations with her failed court case, in which she tried to prove thatRebecca was based on her 1927 novel Blind Windows—her lawsuit cited "46parallelisms" between the two works. But these "parallelisms" were simply plotand character elements found in hundreds of thousands of novels. "I had neverheard of Mrs. MacDonald or her Blind Windows," du Maurier later wrote. "Thenovel was sent to me and I glanced through it. It was nothing like my Rebeccasave for the fact that the man in the book had been married twice." Parallelismisn't the same thing as plagiarism. One could just as easily 'prove' that Rebecca isbased on Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. If plagiarism standards are that lax,the Jane Austen estate could just as legitimately demand remuneration from thecountless stories that recycle the bare ingredients of Pride and Prejudice.

In truth, plot plays only a small part in the lasting success of this novel. The storyitself is simple, and even the supposedly surprising twists are often telegraphedlong in advance. What sets Rebecca apart from its peers is its author’s mastery oftone and mood, emotion and psychology.

This dark gothic romance was an immediate bestseller upon its release in 1938,and the success of the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film adaptation—which won theAcademy Award for Best Picture—only served to boost sales. But most bestsellersfrom that era are now forgotten. Not so for Rebecca, which has never been out-of-print, and still sells around 50,000 copies per year. When a musical version waslaunched in 2006, it ran for three years in Vienna, and later found receptiveaudiences in Finland, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Sweden. Plans are stillafoot to mount a production on Broadway.

So Rebecca lives on, and has now moved far beyond Manderley to become a hotglobal property. Perhaps the story that went from mass-market romance tohighbrow literary work will eventually come full circle. Perhaps the musical willlead to another Rebecca movie (I’ve even seen a YouTube video that envisions anupdating with Jon Hamm as Maxim de Winter), and maybe a book tie-in. Whoknows, perhaps Rebecca will even return to that supermarket rack someday. Butonly in very classy supermarkets.

Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listento Jazz, published by Basic Books.